For now
by writerfan2013
Summary: Prequel. Henry and solitude and family. Slight case!fic and slight for-no-reason wistful romance.
1. Chapter 1

This story precedes the show. Please ignore all pseudoscience.

* * *

The deceased had a great many relatives and none of them was what Henry would describe as unassuming.

He stood back, quietly removing his gloves and white coat, preparing to slip from the morgue's visitor room and let Lucas manage the chaos which was evidently about to break out.

"Not so fast, boss." Lucas' arm shot out. Henry glowered at the familiarity from his assistant and Lucas flinched. "Dr Morgan. You're needed here."

Henry sighed. "You know me too well."

"I know you're the ME in charge and if you duck out now I might say something ill-advised and bring the service into disrepute."

"A threat. I see." Henry refastened his lab coat and turned back to the throng. "Very well. Excuse me!" He raised his voice and the crowd ignored him completely. "Excuse me!"

He grabbed the nearest implement - a pair of liver tongs - and struck a tattoo against the metal edge of the vending machine.

The hubbub ceased. Chips and Snickers bars rattled in their coils. "Thank you," said Henry. "Who here is the next of kin of Kevin Brennan?"

Seventeen voices claimed the honour.

"Let me try another way," Henry said. "Who here enjoys filling in very boring forms?"

"I'll do it," said a woman, edging through the crush of people. "God knows I've nowhere else to be."

She was slender and silver-haired, the kind of pale silver-blonde colour that women go when they don't want to go grey. She was dressed in a pale blue coat like an Easter sky. Her hair was short, but expensively cut, and while her knee-length skirt and court heels suggested glamour, Henry noticed that her nails were not painted. Indeed her hands were as red and raw as a washerwoman's.

Henry nodded to Lucas, who began to shepherd the rest of them out.

"Kevin was my cousin," said the woman. She held out her hand. "Grace Brennan."

Henry shook hands. "Doctor Henry Morgan. I'm the medical examiner for the city. -Your cousin apppears to have been a popular man."

Grace Brennan snorted. "His money was popular. I'd say he himself was the least social man I've ever known. A hermit, he was." There was a lilt to her accent, an echo from far away and long ago.

"His death - because of the potential size of the estate - has come under my jurisdiction," said Henry. "And it was unexpected. I need to confirm that no foul play was involved. Do you know if anyone would want to harm him? "

She shook her head. "I wanted to kill him myself about half the time." She seemed unaware that this might be a provocative statement. "But that's just family, you know what I mean."

Henry grimaced. "In this place, Mrs Brennan, one sees so much of death that it is hard to imagine wanting more of it."

"I suppose so," she said, once more with the musical cadence to her voice. "And it's isn't Mrs Brennan. It's Miss."

"Of course," said Henry, peering more closely at her. He smiled as he ticked off the details in his mind. "Kevin was your father's brother's son. You've never been married, I see that now."

Her eyes gleamed. "What makes you say that, Dr Morgan?"

He indicated her hands. "Because anyone who has spent, what is it, twenty years, caring for a sick cousin had hardly had time for romance."

She folded her hands under her arms, staring.

"The fact that you've kept it a secret, when there's so much to gain from Kevin's will, makes it all the more intriguing," said Henry.

"Nobody knows," she whispered. "Nobody. So how do you -"

"You'd better come into my office," said Henry.


	2. Chapter 2

It was Grace's first time in a morgue. Not, presumably, her last. It was where everybody ended, though most people, presumably, did not require the ministrations of Dr Henry Morgan.

She took the seat he offered, and glanced around the room. It was modern, clinical, and rather neat - except for his desk, which was a smear of papers and pens, topped with two framed photos, one faded, of a woman in a beautiful Forties dress, and a more recent one, of an older gent in a terrible suit.

His mother and father, she guessed. There wasn't a resemblance, but time smooths some edges and sharpens others, so you never could tell. As a stranger, she was free to speculate.

Free. She did not, as yet, feel free. It would come, she hoped.

She took the forms and began filling them out. It was all the things she had been led to expect. She knew about tax and wills. She'd seen plenty of deaths in her time, in her large and unruly family.

The page before her blurred, and tears dropped onto it in triplicate.

A folded white handkerchief appeared under her nose. "Please," said Henry Morgan, and for the first time she looked at him properly.

He was young, thirty or so, with the kind of curly dark hair that heroes used to have. He had bright brown eyes too, and a mouth set in a regretful half-smile. "Thank you," she said. "You must get sick of weeping relations."

"Not at all," he said and it was so unconvincing that Grace laughed. He smiled too. "I'm sorry. I never was any good at being tactful."

"I don't believe that." How long had it been since she saw such gallantry? She wiped her face, thinking that her mascara was never going to be the same again, and offered him back his handkerchief. He shook his head. "You've an endless supply no doubt," she said.

"Ah. you've guessed the secret to a successful career as an ME," he said. "The handkerchief cupboard."

He chuckled, a sweet low sound. Grace liked it, and took an awfully long time filling out those forms.

* * *

Henry leaned back in his polished dining chair. Around him, antiques showed as shadows in the dim evening light. This was their dining room, but it was also Abe's antiques shop, and he and Henry ate surrounded by the evidence of ages past. Some of the treasures belonged to Henry, things he had sought out to remind him of his youth - his true youth, not this strange facsimile of life with a young face and an ancient heart.

"The wine's good," Abe said. He stood, wincing, to pour them each a splash more.

"You should get your back checked," Henry told him.

"Yes, Dad." Abe pulled a face at him..

"At your age the ligaments -"

"All right already. I'll get it looked at. Have your wine." But Abe smiled at his adoptive father, and Henry smiled back, and sighed.

"What now?"

Henry pushed his glass around in the table. "Sorry. I'm troubled by a case at work. It's routine really, simply confirming the cause of death in order to satisfy the coroner. But..."

"You don't know the cause." Abe sipped his wine, and reached for his glasses to frown at Henry.

"Oh I do. But it makes no sense."

"So tell me."

Henry stared over Abe's shoulder and through the window, as if Grace and her cousin were standing outside the shop, gazing in at the scene. He tried to find the words."A rich man dies, and all his relations turn up, eager for a slice of the pie." Abe brightened. "Calm down, he has a proper will." Abe simmered down again. A decent will meant it was unlikely that an estate auction might swell the stock of the antique store. "None of the relations have seen the rich man in twenty years," Henry continued. "All are convinced of their right to some of his wealth. Then one woman volunteers for the admin burden."

"All right, so what's the issue?"

"It appears to have been murder. And this woman was the only person to have been close to him."

"So she did it. I don't get it."

Henry wrinkled his brow. "That's just it. I don't think she's a killer of any kind. But she's lying about so many things...it doesn't look good for her, frankly."

Abe regarded Henry narrowly. "What's her name?"

"Grace," said Henry. He could not quite manage a neutral tone.

Abe smirked. "Good-looking, huh? Well, it's been a long time. You need a little female company."

Henry scowled through his smile. "That's quite enough, Abraham. Bedtime."

Abe chuckled, and of course made no move. He was seventy. Nobody told him when to go to his room.

"She seems to have so many secrets," Henry said after a pause in which parental discipline was ignored. "She's done all this for her cousin, and lied about it, and claims to want nothing from the estate. Why?"

The answer was so obvious that Abe could not bear to say it. He patted Henry's hand, and said nothing.


	3. Chapter 3

Henry's office was a calm place. Here, he could imagine that he was making progress in his work, that solitude was soothing.

Yet, in a breach of convention most unlike him, here he was with a guest.

Grace stood gazing at the glass cases which held the chemicals of Henry's trade. She was biting the insides of her cheeks and appeared nervous. Today her coat was green, the lovely colour of a Welsh valley in spring. She wore it with the collar turned up, but Henry could still see the folds of her neck, and the edge of a locket on a gold chain at her throat.

He cleared his throat. "Your cousin suffered a rare condition, a collection of allergy and intolerances that must have made his life a very restricted one."

"Kevin never left the house," Grace said.

"He couldn't stand a broad range of foodstuffs, or sunlight, or animal hair, or pollen. Exposure to any one of those, by accident or on purpose, could set off a potentially fatal reaction." Henry lay down his file and came across the room to her. Gently he lifted her right hand and turned it over. It was less pink today but calloused and worn. And warm. He let go. "You had to scrub your hands raw before you could touch him."

She nodded.

"You were his carer," Henry said. "But why the secrecy?"

Grace sighed and raised her arms, let them drop in a gesture of defeat. "Because of the money. If the others had got wind that I was seeing him every day, they would have been all over me like a rash." She stopped herself. "Oh God. No pun intended. It's hardly the place -"

"Quite all right. Carry on."

"They'd have thought I was currying favour, trying to get myself into his will." Grace made an unhappy shape with her mouth. Pale pink lipstick today.

Henry asked neutrally, "And were you?"

"I was helping him," she said. "And I told you I don't want a penny for any of it."

Her skirt was this season's Diane von Furstenberg. Her shoes were handmade. "What's your job, Miss Brennan?"

"Call me Grace. And I've no job. Not since I started caring for Kevin full time."

"Hmmm." Henry turned to his notes, although he didn't need them. " So your cousin lived in a sterile environment, never left his apartment, and was very restricted in his habits. Did he have many carers?"

"Just me. I let the rest of the family think it was all done by a company. He never told them. Hardly ever spoke, as a matter of fact. Just sat with his headphones on, attached to that computer, making his trades." She heaved a sigh of fond tolerance.

"But he did have visitors?"

"Not as you'd call it. He would come to the door of his office and let people shout from the front hallway. I tell you, it drove you mad sometimes. The arrogance."

"So why do it? He was a wealthy man. Why not find a professional carer and let them take the strain?"

"Kevin was an only child, like me," she said. "When our parents died, neither of us had anyone to share the grief. No siblings. He came to my father's funeral. And I went to his. Nothing was said. But it was enough, and when he got sick, young, so young, I started showing up to help around the house."

Henry mused on this, tracing an invisible circle on the cover of the file with his pen. "The stock market," he said.

"That's right. He was a grizzly old beggar but he was a genius with trading. Made millions. And of course it was a job where he didn't have to go out."

"Of course." The circle turned to a spiral and still Henry sat.

"You haven't told me the main thing," she said after a while.

"Sorry what?" Henry's head was full of families and goodbyes.

"How he died. What killed him."

"Oh. Of course. I'm sorry. My tests showed a build-up of toxins in his blood. He was weak. He didn't have a chance, given his condition."

"But nobody came near him," she said. "Nobody was allowed to come near him. Because of his allergies."

"Only you," said Henry, and watched her pale.

"Only me. My God."

Henry said, "He must have paid you well for your work. Those are handmade English shoes."

She blinked down at them. "Kevin...No. They were a gift."

"Come now," said Henry. "I can tell when someone is lying."

"You're not the police," she said. "And I've done nothing wrong."

They stared at each other.

"The tox report will confirm my assessment of how he died," said Henry.

"I'm sure it will."

"Let me help you. Please. You stand to gain hugely in the will. You had access to the deceased and the means to kill him. But I don't believe you did it."

"Of course I didn't," she said. "Your tests must be wrong. And I don't want Kevin's money."

Henry stretched his hand out to her but drew it back. "Grace. You had motive and opportunity. If you tell me the truth I can help."

"I've no need of help from anyone," she said.

"Everyone needs help sometimes," Henry said softly. And as he spoke, he realised it was true.


	4. Chapter 4

"Not your usual shindig," Abe said, watching Henry tie a cravat with solicitous care.

"Funeral and will reading," said Henry. He inspected his reflection. The old suit today, his favourite. It had kept well, given its last outing had been in 1963.

"Anyone I know?" asked Abe.

"A millionaire. The one I told you about."

"Can I come?"

"His apartment was full of computers and bleach," said Henry. "Nothing you can pass off as Louis Quatorze I'm afraid."

"I resent the implication."

"Well, you'll have to resent it without me, I'm late." Henry tucked a handkerchief into his coat pocket, hesitated, and then added a spare.

"Don't keep the lady waiting," Abe said. "You know you're transparent, yes?"

"Oh hush." Henry patted Abe's shoulder and dashed for the door, and a cab.

* * *

"Nothing," said Grace, emerging from the will reading with Henry's handkerchief pressed to the corner of one eye. "He left me nothing."

Other relations streamed out of the room behind her, laughing and clapping each other on the back like winners at the race track. The estate lawyers followed, clutching two briefcases each.

Henry took her arm. "You must be very relieved."

"Relieved! I'm thrilled." She leaned on him.

He smiled. "Just as I thought."

Her eyes narrowed. "You..."

"Come with me," said Henry. "I've got something to show you."

* * *

"I don't know how to read this."

They were in a small bar, what Americans call a pub, though no English pub has table service. But Henry liked this place. He'd been coming here for years.

He slid a photo across the table to Grace. "It's a slide taken from your cousin's blood. It shows the makeup of the blood, which antibodies are present, and so on. In the blood of a typical person, there would be a low percentage. In the blood of someone having a massive allergic reaction, you would see a great many purplish cells."

"I can't see any," she said.

"Precisely. You were right and I was wrong. I've worked so long alone with nobody to challenge me. I'm sorry. Your cousin was not exposed to any of the things which may have triggered his allergies."

"So how did he die? Why did he die?"

"The allergies had nothing to do with it. He overdosed on one of his medicines. By the amount, I suspect accidentally. The dosage may not have killed another person, but in his weakened system it was unfortunately enough."

She covered her mouth with her hands. "Not murder. Thank God. Who would have wanted to harm him?" She had evidently forgotten her previous remarks about how irritating her cousin could be. But then as she said, that was family. And Henry had a little experience of family.

"His estate is divided among the family, more or less proportionally by distance of relationships, judging by the spectrum of celebration I saw after the reading."

"That's about right."

"Yet you got nothing. You. who alone of all of them took the time to care for him. Frail as he was, he was perfectly sane. Here, Miss Brennan is another deeper mystery."

Grace blushed. "Something tells me you already know its answer."

"You're clearly a wealthy woman in your own right," Henry said.

"Rich in love," said Grace. "The affections of my large family." Her eyes dared him to say more.

"Love alone doesn't buy a coat by Chanel." It was yellow like the earliest primulas.

She lay her hand fleetingly over his. Henry looked down, then back up to her sparkling eyes. "Kevin did leave me a gift," she said. "All I needed."

"Of course." Henry burst out laughing. "He taught you how to play the stock market."

* * *

He was dark wood and white cotton shirt. The word that came to mind about him was, she realised, antique. She had met men who affected old-fashioned manners - exaggeratedly pulling out chairs or holding open doors. Yet sometimes these displays of attention held no true courtesy. They were a t shirt that read, _See me, I am attentive, I am all about her._

But Henry was not at all like that. From the moment he offered her a hanky, to trying to prevent her incriminating herself, he was the real thing. And although he seemed hardly to smile, there was a glow about him that she liked.

He made her feel, a miracle, young.

"Why do you smile?" Henry asked. The bar was bustling and bright. Their first drink was long gone, and their second.

"Something you didn't do."

His eyebrows went up.

"You didn't let me know you were caring for me." It was hard to explain. Kevin had been a little like it too, she realised: giving her something truly valuable, not just a dole of a dead man's cash. "You just did what was right without making a fuss."

His dark eyes dipped down then, and he shuffled and murmured some denial. Those eyelashes! Really, it was a crime. "I'm no cradlesnatcher," she said, apropos of nothing.

His mouth quirked. "No, you're not."

"But can I buy you dinner?"

He became still, and then right afterwards started fiddling with his glass, glancing around.

"The lady asking's a touch too modern for your taste, huh?" Grace drained her drink.

"Not at all. I'm just not sure it would be entirely appropriate."

But he glanced at her, and his eye travelled from her face down her arm to her hand wrapped around her glass. His gaze lingered, and she saw his indrawn breath.

Odd, but not weird. Hands, why not? It wasn't as if her ass was any great shakes these days.

He was gazing at her fingers again. She turned over her wrist so that it lay on its back on the polished table, and his eyes widened.

"You have a thing about hands," she said. Before he could deny it she said, "It's ok. Makes a change from the areas most men ogle."

She reached across and touched his knuckles, clenched around the stem of his glass. "You have beautiful hands yourself." He was warm. She wrapped her fingers around his and felt the tension rise in his skin.

"It's not hands," he said then. "It's ankles. I cannot resist a neat ankle, glimpsed beneath a gown."

Gown? Ooh la la. "I bet you can," she said. "You have the look of a man who's spent years resisting."

"Perhaps you're right."

"So why?"

"It's a long story."

She waited.

After a moment she felt her hands enveloped. "I can't tell you," he said. "But I wish I could."

"Hmmm."

"I can tell you this, at the risk of offending you with my crass behaviour..." He made a show of glancing over the edge of the table, then back to her face. He grinned, and all the glow inside him lit up. "Nice ankles."


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's note.** I freely admit this chapter goes beyond the natural ending of the story.

* * *

The evening wore on, rather pleasantly. But Henry had to end it before things became complicated. "I think," he said gently, "you should look for someone closer to your own age."

Grace bit her lip. "The old grey hair too much for you, huh?"

"That's not what I meant," he said. "Not at all."

"Sure it's not. The brain doesn't totally deteriorate come fifty, you know. I can tell when I'm being put on the shelf."

"Grace -". It was impossible to explain. He took her hands in both his and tried. "I'm a lot older than I look."

"I don't doubt it. I'm sure you're all of thirty five. Oh God, who was I kidding? Only myself. No harm done I suppose."

"Wait! I'm older. I swear it. Older than you." By a hundred and fifty years, but he did not add that.

She frowned.

"I'm a ... medical mystery," Henry said, improvising. "But let me tell you that I can remember the Cuban missile crisis, and Kennedy's assassination, and things that happened while you were still a babe in arms. I'm too old for you. That's what I'm trying to say."

"You're lying," she said, but the frown remained.

"Why would I do that?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"Grace, I served in the medical corps in the war. The second world war." And the first, but there was no point terrifying her.

"But you look..." She freed her hand and touched his cheek.

"Yes."

"You're not a vampire, are you?" She laughed awkwardly.

"No, I assure you. I - don't know what I am. Nobody does." He waited for the questions, the eager demands for his history, but none came.

"Well," she said, tugging at her locket, which Henry knew without asking had belonged to her mother. It was the right age. "Where does this leave us?"

"In need of another drink," said Henry. The lies exhausted him. The half truths - they were worse.

"A drink. So are you turning me down or what?"

"I'm - no longer entirely sure," Henry said.

Grace's eyes brightened. "Well now. Keeping a man on the back foot - that's more my style. Come on then, old timer, and spend a little of that army pension on a nice bottle, will you?"

* * *

It was time to go. "I'll walk you to a cab," he said, and offered his arm.

"Come with me," she said. "At least as far as the airport. I'm overdue a vacation and I may as well begin now. You can join me if you like."

He shook his head as a yellow cab drew up at the kerb. "You can drop me off at fifty-ninth. I might go for a walk in the Park."

"At this time of night?"

"I'm not really worried about that."

In the cab, the city lights washed over them, taking away colour, taking away her silver hair and his dark, her sparkling blue eyes and his warm brown, taking away the lines of years and weariness around their eyes, taking away time.

Grace reached for Henry's hand. She looked sideways at him, and sighed, and smiled.

"Oh, what the hell," said Henry, and leaned across and kissed her.

They kissed until neon gave way to sodium and then to the LED brilliance of the airport entryway.

"Mmm," said Grace.

"I still have to go," said Henry. "I'm afraid."

"I thought so."

"But Grace - "

The driver was swinging in to a tiny space in front of the departure lounge.

"Perhaps I can call you," he said, amazing himself.

"You can certainly call me. You've made my day," she said.

"Likewise."

"Then goodbye. For now."

"For now," he echoed, and as the cab moved away he thought that this was a perfectly accurate assessment of their acquaintance. It was for now, and for no other reason. And that was good.

He lay back in the seat and closed his eyes. Across the river, the city swept towards him, a million points of light, a myriad of individual moments, and tonight he went to it willingly.

* * *

**Author's note:** Just a short thought about Henry and the kind of woman he might like. After all, anyone under ninety is going to seem like such a child. What could they share? Henry's youthful good looks are a curse here. If he looked two hundred, how diffrent things would be. And if we all looked thirty five again, how would that change our choice of companion? I don't have the answers, but these things are what I have wondered. -Sef


End file.
